Entries in Administrative Detention
(5)

Photo: JC/ActiveStills“There’s a real transformation in the way the prisoners are working — this time, people are willing to die,” Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said in a recent interview. “Look, the Palestinians may be quiet for a while, but they may erupt. There’s a sinking-in of the idea that nonviolent resistance gets results.”

Hana Shalabi has been on hunger strike for over a month. Her condition has been deteriorating so badly that prison officials had to transfer her to a Haifa hospital (though she wasn't admitted to the hospital).

Shalabi is protesting being held in administrative detention. These detentions are quasi-legal action through which Israel incarcerates individuals without charge or proper trial. Israel inherited this undemocratic procedure from the British mandate, which enacted it as part of the 1945 emergency regulations.

International humanitarian law frowns on this procedure and Israel was asked by the international community on numerous occasions to end this practice. Over 300 Palestinians are presently held without charge.

We have been delivered a joint notice by the representative of the Appellant and the representative of the Respondents, according to which there is no intention to extend the administrative detention beyond 17 April 2012, and (after offsetting the days of detention during which the Appellant was subjected to a criminal investigation), subject to the absence of new and significant material being added in the matter of the Appellant. In light of the above, the Appellant has ended his hunger strike and declared his retraction of the appeal.This being the case, the appeal is stricken, and the hearing schedule for today is thereby cancelled.

Palestinian Boys Protest for Khader AdnanTwitter is filled tonight with messages with the hashtag #KhaderExists for Khader Adnan, now in the 64th day of his hunger strike.

Adnan is in "administrative detention" in an Israeli jail, under which he can be held without charge indefinitely. Last week he explained in a letter, delivered by his lawyer, why he was persisting with his fast:

I started my battle offering my soul to God almighty and adamant to go ahead until righteousness triumphs over falsehood. I am defending my dignity and my people’s dignity and not doing this in vain.

The Israeli occupation has gone to extremes against our people, especially prisoners. I have been humiliated, beaten, and harassed by interrogators for no reason, and thus I swore to God I would fight the policy of administrative detention to which I and hundreds of my fellow prisoners fell prey.

Here I am in a hospital bed surrounded with prison wardens, handcuffed, and my foot tied to the bed. The only thing I can do is offer my soul to God as I believe righteousness and justice will eventually triumph over tyranny and oppression.

I hereby assert that I am confronting the occupiers not for my own sake as an individual, but for the sake of thousands of prisoners who are being deprived of their simplest human rights while the world and international community look on."It is time the international community and the UN support prisoners and force the State of Israel to respect international human rights and stop treating prisoners as if they were not humans.

It was only after talking with lucidity and animation for an hour about her husband's 61-day hunger strike that Randa Jihad Adnan's eyes, visible though the opening of her nekab, filled with tears. Until then, this articulate 31-year-old graduate in sharia law from Al Najar University in Nablus, the pregnant mother of two young daughters aged four and one and half, had described with almost disconcerting poise the two months following the arrest of her husband, Khader Adnan, on 17 December.

He was seized at 3.30am by some of the scores of Israeli military and security personnel who surrounded the family home in a West Bank village south of Jenin, and is now being held in the Israeli Rebecca Ziv hospital in Safed. Yesterday she was allowed to visit him with the children and her father-in-law.

There they found him, weak and extremely thin, his beard unkempt, and his fingernails long. He was shackled by two legs and one arm to his bed, and was connected to a heart monitor. Though mentally alert, he could speak only with difficulty. "I was shocked," she said yesterday. "I couldn't speak for about three minutes, and it was the same for my daughters."